Monday, July 09, 2018

Last year, I had almost simultaneous
failures of both my desk PCs, the office/writing/design machine and
the dedicated music one. This meant I lost some data. The writing,
and most of my documents, were pretty recently backed up so that was
mostly safe. Graphics were another matter. I hadn’t kept quite up
to date there.

So, recently, I got the hard drives
from the music computer mounted and was able to retrieve back ups I
had stored there. That helped; they were not the most absolutely
recent versions of things but better than what I had otherwise. In
fact, there is only one thing I truly regret having lost and that is
the map I made of Cully Beach, the fictional setting of my novels
‘Shaper’ and ‘Waves.’

I could redo them, I suppose. There is
enough description in the books and a fairly decent map in my head.
Moreover, the town is loosely based on Flagler Beach, Florida (with a
bit of Cocoa Beach mixed in), so I have a starting point. If I get
onto a third Cully Beach novel, I just might try a reconstruction.

The floor plan for ‘Shaper’ Ted
Carrol’s home and surf shop is still extant (but not his
neighbor’s, which I also laid out — that doesn’t matter so
much), so there is that. Incidentally, I also did maps and floor
plans for my other ‘Florida novel,’ ‘Asanas.’ Those were not
lost.

There probably will be a third Cully
novel. It is not high on the list right now. But we do need to get
Ted and Michelle happily married, after all, while solving yet
another crime.